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One (God) who exists apart from our material world. Our bodies are, therefore,
temporary cages for the soul that wants to be reunited completely with the perfect truth of
the Divine.
In this scheme the material world is a distraction from the true calling of human
beings, reuniting with God (Bell 1989, 23-25). Indeed, the material world may seduce us
away from our true destiny with God, and therefore betray us onto a path that leads to
damnation. Thus there is a tremendous hostility to materiality and the body that arises
here, a hostility reinforced by other philosophical influences on Christianity such as
Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and Stoicism, all of which expressed broadly similar
antipathy to the body.
The influence of Platonism on Christianity was amplified by the work of St.
Augustine of Hippo, who absorbed the Hellenic and Platonic traditions in his home of
North Africa. In the earlier part of his life, Augustine fully adopted the tenets of
orthodox Platonic Christianity. Augustine especially accepted the notion of all being as a
continuum between inanimate matter all the way up to God. The work of a Christian, to
the early Augustine, was to use reason to perceive the relations within this continuum and
thus follow it up to the divine. Since the human body was part of this continuum, at first
Augustine was much less negative towards the body than he had been in his earlier
Manichean incarnation. To Augustine, the body was a distraction from the rational work
of the soul, but it was also a necessary instrument for the Pilgrim’s progress towards the
Divine (Markus 1990, 48-49). Thus the asceticism of Augustinian Christianity was
present, yet muted.
Later Augustine, however, paradoxically becomes both more and less hostile to
materiality. Reading the Apostle Paul in the 390s, Augustine rejected the view that
human beings’ rational capacities and will were adequate to reveal the truth of God.
Instead, a yawning chasm opened up between man’s rational strivings and God that could
only be bridged by the unfathomable grace of God. This view led Augustine to reject the
perfectionism of the Pelagians of his day in a way that embraced materiality to some
extent. Augustine, for instance, did not believe that true Christians would be able to put
the body aside completely and live utterly pure lives of sensual denial (50-55). But at the
same time, by placing the consummation of Christian unity with God outside the material
Convention